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2011-04-19

Terror, Performance and Post 9/11 Literature Terror, Performance and Post 9/11 Literature

Elise Christine Silva Brigham Young University - Provo

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Terror, Performance, and Post 9/11 Literature

Elise C. Silva

A thesis submitted to the faculty of

Brigham Young University

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Masters of Arts

Kristin L. Matthews, Chair

Trenton L. Hickman

Phillip A. Snyder

Department of English

Brigham Young University

August 2011

Copyright © 2011 Elise C. Silva

All Rights Reserved

ABSTRACT

Terror, Performance and Post 9/11 Literature

Elise C. Silva

Department of English, BYU

Master of Arts

This project explores 9/11 as a performative act that is re-represented in post 9/11 fiction.

Although many scholars have engaged spectacle theory to understand the event, this project

asserts that performance theory gives a more dynamic and ethical reading of post 9/11 literatures

like Jonathan Safran Foer‘s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Don DeLillo‘s Falling

Man. The aforementioned post 9/11 texts showcase narrative performances and also give formal

performances for an audience of readers. Theatricality in these texts promotes dialogue and

healing through interactive communication.

Keywords: 9/11 Fiction, Performance Theory

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is a pleasure to thank those who made this thesis possible. I am grateful to Dr. Kristin

Matthews for her editorial eye and willingness to invest so heavily in my drafts. Her expertise

has made this project something of which I am truly proud. Likewise, I appreciated the helpful

feedback that both Dr. Phil Snyder and Dr. Trent Hickman gave in my drafting process—thank

you for pushing me to my full potential. My husband, Rodrigo Silva, has likewise been

supportive, loving, and ever patient. Obrigado, meu amor. Finally, I express my love and

appreciation for my family: Mom, Dad, Thomas, Audrey, and Gracie have all given me the

dynamic background that makes me strong enough to confront and work through tough topics.

iv

Table of Contents

TERROR, PERFORMANCE, AND POST 9/11 LITERATURE .................................................. 1

Rethinking Post 9/11 Literary Criticism ......................................................................................... 1

Performance Theory and Post 9/11 Fiction .................................................................................... 4

Performances in Post 9/11 Literature .............................................................................................. 7

Post 9/11 literature as Performance .............................................................................................. 19

Dramatic Conclusions ................................................................................................................... 26

End Notes ...................................................................................................................................... 29

Works Cited .................................................................................................................................. 30

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TERROR, PERFORMANCE, AND POST 9/11 LITERATURE

Rethinking Post 9/11 Literary Criticism

Modern Fiction Studies recently issued a special call for papers to examine post 9/11

texts. Specifically, the journal asked for essays that ―reflect[ed] on fiction's and film's various

responses to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001‖ and that ―explored the . . . successes

and failures of these narrative mediations‖ (660). The call for papers evidences the literary

community‘s continued attention about how best to approach 9/11 as a cultural event with lasting

political and social effects. Assessing the ―successes and failures‖ of post 9/11 narratives,

Modern Fiction Studies invited the scholarly community to take part in theorizing the ethics of

representation for an event that is ambiguous both in meaning and in cultural impact.

With the ten year anniversary of 9/11 fast approaching, critics continue to revisit the

various frameworks used to consider both the event and the fiction following it. One major point

of discussion among scholars is spectacle theory—a framework articulated in Jean Baudrillard‘s

The Spirit of Terrorism (2002). Baudrillard posits that as a spectacle, 9/11 exists outside of

experience: ―The terrorist violence here is not, then, a blowback of reality, any more than it is a

blowback of history. It is not ‗real.‘ In a sense, it is worse: it is symbolic‖ (29). The ―symbolic‖

becomes a liability for Baudrillard because it distances spectators from the spectacle. Spectacle

theorists also approach 9/11 with the understanding that it was a mass-consumed, ―symbolic‖

event waiting to happen, and that it was in fact patterned after American fascination with disaster

movies. In Reframing 9/11 (2010), Reza Aslan contends, ―[i]f [9/11] sounded like a plot to a

Hollywood movie, it‘s because that is precisely what it was.‖ Aslan then compares 9/11 to

Hollywood blockbuster The Siege (1998) which ―conjures up a New York City made so paranoid

by a series of terrorist attacks that the government must declare martial law and send in the

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military to police the petrified residents‖ (xi). According to these theorists, 9/11 cannot be

conceptualized in the ―real‖ because of its symbolic nature and its profound root in ―the image‖

which is static, removed, and cinematic in nature. Both the image and the excessive violence of

9/11 are consumed by viewers through media representations of terror. This is problematic

because audiences were distanced from the event‘s abstracted horror, by what Glen McGillivray

calls a ―Manhattan disaster movie‖ (par 10).

However, while it may be true that 9/11 was a ―spectacular‖ event, 9/11 warrants an

examination of the ways in which its complex, staged performance functions in a postmodern,

terror-filled world. Years before 9/11, terrorist analyst at the RAND corporation, Brian Jenkins

said, ―terrorism is theater,‖ asserting a symbiotic relationship between the media and terrorists

(―International Terrorism‖ 4). Terrorists need spectators just as an actor needs an audience for

the act to have meaning. What Jenkins‘ metaphor suggests is far more reaching than a static

spectacle because it invokes a complex production where actors and audiences are involved in

making terror. Exploring the terror-as-theater metaphor allows us to unpack the nuanced

performance of 9/11 in a way that considering an objectified ―spectacle‖ does not. In addition,

analysis of performance highlights the relationship between actors and audiences which focuses

on movement and interaction, not removal and distance. Therefore, the notion of performance

provides a fresh way of viewing not only the original event, but literatures dealing with the event

that have emerged in the past ten years. Assessing the underanalyzed avenue of performances

and performativity in the field of 9/11 literature illustrates the profound way that post 9/11

fictions act and react to the original theatrical event through questioning the boundaries of

identity and ethics in the context of terror.

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Most importantly, post 9/11 fictions highlight the many ways that communication

happens in the context of terror and its intricate theater. Both Don DeLillo‘s Falling Man (2007),

and Jonathan Safran Foer‘s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) explore avenues of

communication and meaning making in the face of an event that many critics suggested defied

language, description, and expression.1 Through immediacy and movement, these texts reject a

closed and inert polarized interpretation of 9/11 and invite a pastiche of interpretations and

interactions. Through this communicative connection, authors, texts, and readers convene to

create a new solidarity in the light of extreme political divisions that occurred as an initial

reaction to the event. Instead of relying exclusively on the world of symbol and static spectacle

which stills communication, these texts attempt to reinstitute nuances and complexities that

demand readers become a part of the story, history, and even the future of 9/11 studies through

reading. Interactive spaces where actor and audience meet are interpreted as dynamic and

symbolic, rather than completely outside the confines of language, conversation, and experience.

After all, how can an event be completely outside of these modes? In these texts, communication

occurs on various levels: through the actor/audience connection, the text/reader connection, the

terrorist/victim connection, and even through the reality/fiction connection. As the texts implode

these binaries, identities are confused, reformed, and most importantly, re-―acted‖ to consider

multiple ways of responding to terrorism. Instead of taking part in the political dialogue and

cultural backlash about 9/11 and culpability, these literatures point towards a future where

healing actions and therapeutic conversations can take place through new avenues of

conversation.

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Performance Theory and Post 9/11 Fiction

Since 9/11, major performance theory texts like Richard Schechner‘s Performance

Studies (2002), Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postelwait‘s Theatricality (2003), Samuel Weber‘s

Theatricality as a Medium (2004), and Mathew Causey‘s Theatre and Performance in Digital

Culture (2006) have all weighed in on the implications of studying 9/11 as a theatrical event.

Performance studies examines arts, religious rituals, language, politics, and social behaviors as

constructed, rehearsed, and either consciously or unconsciously mimetic. In short, performance

theorists are interested in what performances (as widely defined) accomplish and how they do so.

The field is also interested in the ways that 9/11 reinterprets traditional understandings of

staging, audience, and actor in order to comprehend the original event‘s intent. Traditional

theater as basically defined lies within the realm of the performing arts: performances are staged,

rehearsed acts. The post 9/11 moment is unique in its theatrical framework, however, and

performance studies can help give vocabulary to an otherwise spectacularized and objectified

event. 9/11 broke political and military convention in its asymmetrical symbolic attack, and thus

warrants a rethinking of the parameters of both performance and performativity. How does one,

then, define performance, performativity, and theatricality in the post 9/11 literary moment?

Gabriel Wieman suggests that 9/11 was different in its theatrical scope than any other

previous act of terror. He writes,

From the theater-of-terror perspective, the September 11 attack on America was a

perfectly choreographed production aimed at American and international

audiences. Although the theater metaphor remains instructive, it has given way to

that of terrorism as a global television . . . but the September 11 attack introduced

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a new level of mass mediated terrorism because of the choices the planners made

with respect to method, target, timing, and scope. (70)

The ―production‖ of 9/11 initiated a ―new level‖ of terrorist and theater studies, and marked a

new level of literary response to grapple with new ―methods‖ and ―scopes‖ of violent

communication. Although spectacularized, ―global television‖ represents one way to discuss the

theatrics of 9/11, and the complex theatrical ―choices planners made‖ invite further scholarship

by literary theorists in order to understand cultural artifacts responding to the event.

Post 9/11 performances in literature still follow the basic definitions of traditional

performances—they are both staged and symbolic, and are directed towards an audience. Indeed,

9/11 was an event for which terrorists trained and executed on a media stage. In the context of

9/11, then, performances question the functionality of a stage and begin to break it down in order

to more intimately involve audience members in the action. 9/11 texts portray these kinds of

performances as both rehearsed and improvised staged events which act as focal points for

audiences and actors to rethink 9/11‘s initial media staging. Therefore, analyzing performances

in post 9/11 texts involves unpacking instances of theater—mimetic moments of performing arts

that imitate the drama of 9/11 in their execution.

Performativity and theatricality, however, are different than what one might imagine to

be quintessential performance art. As Schechner contends, ―There are limits to what ‗is‘

performance. But just about anything can be studied ‗as‘ performance‖ (30). Texts and

characters considered ―as‖ performative in post 9/11 fiction demonstrate theatricality in their

behavior rather than their overt staging—having more to do with the intent of their ―act‖ rather

than the staged execution of such. Performativity is dramatic behavior. Performativity and

theatricality are defined by Schechner in terms of movement: ―any behavior, event, action, or

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thing can be studied ‗as‘ performance, can be analyzed in terms of doing, behaving, and

showing‖ (32, my emphasis). If performances are symbolic behaviors, how do post 9/11 texts

act? Interrogating post 9/11 texts ―as‖ theater highlights the relationship between the ―behavior‖

or performativity of the text in the context of an audience. Meaning is created not by just an

author, reader, or a text—instead it is created through the open dialogue and communication

between the three via action, interaction, and relation. As Schechner posits, ―Performance isn‘t

‗in‘ anything but ‗between‘‖ (24).

Thus, post 9/11 literatures ―act‖ with an awareness of an audience from whom they invite

reactions using dramatizations and showiness. Performance and 9/11 literature underlines the

significance of fluid moments where objects and people meet—moments of contact, rather than

moments of staged, objectified, distance. 9/11 as a performative was used to elicit fear in a

national and international audience—it behaved theatrically in order to promote audience

response through terror. Extending this definition, one could contend that every behavior or ―act‖

is potentially performative in post 9/11 texts, and behavioral theorists using the concept of

theatricality to unpack cultural performances would advocate this line of thinking. The behaviors

that are the most intriguing in the context of 9/11, however, are the ones that carry out a specific

purpose in relation to the original event, underlining the interest of performance studies in

interrogating how performances achieve their intended aims. Performances and theatrics have

desired outcomes—purposes that drive their staging. If 9/11 was meant to send a message of fear

and terror, then it did so by executing an unprecedented performance in terms of its lasting

destruction on US soil—pitting holy warriors against the infidels of the West. Likewise, initial

nationalistic responses to 9/11 were equally polarized in their distancing the ―us‖ from the

―them.‖ Post 9/11 texts respond to the absoluteness of identity and terror with dramatizations to

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rethink 9/11 and promote healing through ―recasting‖ the complexities of seemingly absolute

identities and histories.

Considering post 9/11 texts ―as‖ theatrical involves analyzing the way they offer

themselves up as dramatic focal points and stages of ideas and counternarratives. They do this in

their dynamic exchanges between actors and audiences which promote identities defined by

relationality rather than intert distance and polarization. As performance theorist David Román

suggests, ―Performance‘s liveness and impermanence allow for a process of exchange—between

artists and audiences, between the past and the present—where new social formations emerge

[which] constitute a counterpublic that offers both respite and change from normative structures

of being . . . ‖ (1-2). By straddling different conceptions of theater, both by considering cultural

artifacts as theater and by looking at the theatrical elements in those artifacts, literary theorists

will be better able to explore the ―process of exchange‖ that Román defines and avoid the

uncritical use of the term ―performance.‖ As such, post 9/11 texts question the roles of

audiences, actors, and identities in the post 9/11 moment where many traditional boundaries of

communication and symbol were shattered by an asymmetrical act of terror. As they respond,

they attempt to open up new dynamic communication methods where neither the actor nor the

audience is the sole meaning maker, and offer ―respite‖ in a terror-filled world.

Performances in Post 9/11 Literature

Defining what constitutes a performance depends on context, history, and culture:

―something ‗is‘ a performance when historical and social context, convention, usage, and

tradition say it is‖ (Schechner 30). In contemporary theatrical convention, something that is

artistically presented on a stage, like a play, can be considered a performance. In the following

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examples from Don DeLillo‘s Falling Man, a street performer delivers a chilling act that forces

his audience to rethink their identities by revisiting 9/11‘s horror.

Falling Man showcases a performer who recreates the image of the iconic 9/11 falling

man dropping to his death from the World Trade Center, therein questioning the boundaries of

―art‖ and highlighting the symbiotic relationship between performer and audience. DeLillo‘s

performer achieves this image as he hangs himself precariously upside down from buildings to

reimagine the fall in ―still life‖ form. This act causes a vehement response among most observers

who do not want to be confronted with the falling man‘s depiction of death and horror. For

example, one of the novel‘s protagonists Lianne, sees the falling man‘s act several times

throughout the novel. She is initially disturbed by the image, noting:

Traffic was barely moving now. There were people shouting up at him, outraged

at the spectacle . . . It held the gaze of the world, she thought. There was the awful

openness of it, something we‘d not seen, the single falling figure that trails a

collective dread, body come down among us all. And now, she thought, this little

theater piece, disturbing enough to stop traffic and send her back into the

terminal. (33)

Lianne‘s progression in terming the episode a ―spectacle‖ in the beginning and near the end a

―theater piece‖ illustrates her changing perception of the ―act.‖ The spectacular nature of the

falling man causes an immediate backlash as the audience‘s ―outrage‖ boils over into ―shouting‖;

yet, the act also makes Lianne reflect on the symbolism of the performance, a reinterpretation

and reconfrontation of the ―dread‖ of 9/11. In this confrontation, the performance asks Lianne to

relive her raw fear and confusion as she originally experienced it. However, this time she relives

it in an informed way—she now knows where the attack came from, why it happened, and the

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initial political responses to the attack. It also gives her a chance to rethink her response to the

original horror. The ―openness‖ of the interpretation, furthermore, is where she connects with

and responds to the falling man not as a spectacle, but as a ―theater piece‖—a piece in which she

is implicated as the body descends, ―coming down among us all.‖ More than a passive moment

suggesting that Lianne consider 9/11, the act forcefully confronts her and incorporates her own

interpretation as part of the experience within the ―newness‖ of its execution. It is not overly

prescriptive, but ―open‖ enough to invite new counternarratives which challenge initial

nationalistic and traumatic ones that emerged in response to the original man bodies from the

World Trade Center (WTC).

Lianne‘s further reactions to the falling man illustrate a budding self-awareness in which

she begins to analyze her own actions in addition to the street performer‘s act. The second time

she witnesses the falling man, she wants to leave like she did the first time, yet she cannot take

her eyes off of the figure: ―She wished she could believe this was some kind of antic street

theater, and absurdist drama that provokes onlookers to share a comic understanding of what is

irrational in the great schemes of being or in the next small footstep. This was too near and deep,

too personal‖ (163). Lianne notes that this type of ―theater‖ stands on the edge of too private

because it showcases the horror of an immediate death still fresh on the audience‘s mind. For

Lianne, this crosses an emotional boundary highlighting something so awful that she wants to

forget rather than to revisit it. The repetition of the word ―too‖ underlines an excess of feeling

which Lianne does not want to face, but is forced to by the ―drama.‖ Lianne yeans for a more

emotionally distanced staging where ―antics‖ and ―absurdity‖ would create ―understanding‖ in a

superficial way. Conventional theater, Lianne thinks, would not implicate the personal so openly

and painfully, but would instead respect the distance between the event and the reaction through

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the absurd. The act is certainly ―provoking,‖ but not in the way Lianne wishes; however, it still

demands her attention. She begins to analyze her own perceived need for distance in relation to

the performance, and she must look inward to do so. In the end, the ―understanding‖ she finds in

the drama is ―personal‖ enough to make her uneasy—an intimacy in which she must come to

terms with herself because she cannot simply melt into the crowd and run away. As an onlooker,

Lianne is even more a part of this performance than she is the original performance of 9/11

which she cannot seem to stop watching over and over again. She admits, ―Every time she saw a

videotape of the planes she moved a finger toward the power button on the remote. Then she

kept on watching‖ (134).

Indeed, the falling man‘s performance is different than Lianne‘s TV watching because

there is no ―remote‖ to distance herself from the action. She is also unable to emotionally

distance herself because of the extremity of the falling man‘s act. His performance is close,

personal, and meant, Lianne thinks, to recreate the frantic response New Yorkers had to 9/11 as

audiences are reconfronted with the haunting image of a falling stranger that could just as easily

be a friend, coworker, or relative. She thinks, ―Then she began to understand. Performance art,

yes, but he wasn‘t here to perform for those at street level or in the high windows. He was

situated where he was . . . waiting for a train to come, northbound, this is what he wanted, an

audience in motion, passing scant yards from his standing figure‖ (164). Although the

performance is removed in physical distance, the emotional distance is collapsed as Lianne

analyzes the falling man‘s interaction with his specific audience. She is afforded a critical, meta-

moment in which she imagines the people on the train reacting to his fall—a fall that they do not

realized is staged so carefully: ―She wondered if this was his intention, to spread the word this

way, by cell phone, intimately, as in the towers and in the hijacked planes‖ (165). In her

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assessment, the critical connection between the actor and his audience is the ―motion‖ of the

audience that is unachievable through watching a performance on a traditional stage, a news

broadcast, or any other ―spectacle‖-like act featuring ―antics‖ and ―absurdist drama.‖ This

―motion‖ moves away from the stationary television, or even the emotionally distanced

performance, to a moving one in which the audience and the actor are involved ―intimately‖ in a

frighteningly real act. Some of the audience members are more startled than others by the

performance because they are unaware it is an act, adding to the immediacy. The performance

brings the falling man figure back to life in a way that no other gesture could. It extends the

boundaries of ―performance art‖ in its extremism and also reconnects audiences with the original

event which was highly removed and emotionally distanced through media depictions.

Lianne‘s second encounter with the falling man begins to break down the traditional

boundaries between actor and audience and this collapse causes Lianne to critically rethink her

positionality as an audience member who is suddenly required to react as an integral part of the

artistic meaning making process. Lianne initially wishes that the conventions of traditional

theatrics would be observed. However, just as 9/11 as an event did not follow conventions of

traditional warfare and symbolic expression—it was asymmetrical, wider in scope than any

previous act of terror, and represented the first major penetration of American defenses at

home—the text seems to suggest that artistic representations of 9/11 must likewise push

boundaries to make new sense of the original act. Thus, Lianne remains caught in the middle,

trying to interpret this new mode of communication that is asymmetrical, intimate, and

perpetually in motion. The communication happens through Lianne‘s understanding of

performance, and the vocabulary that goes with it, as she terms the experience everything from

performance art to absurdist street theater.

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For Lianne, the falling man‘s street theater symbolizes a responsive necessity because it

represents excessive feelings. Performance theorist John Bell suggests that, although the 9/11 act

cannot be termed ―art‖ or ―artistic,‖ it can be thought of in terms of ―performance,‖ and in doing

so, a deeper understanding of the event and reactions to it is possible. He contends:

Using the tools of performance studies to analyze how calculated violence is

employed in media-saturated society is not an insult to the memories of those who

died, but an essential means of understanding the undeniably symbolic level at

which global conflict is now being played out. It is clear that such vivid terms as

"Axis of Evil," "Homeland Security," and "Weapons of Mass Destruction" have

been put into play with full cognizance of their semiotic value, and we will only

understand the actual implications of these concepts and the actions connected to

them—performatives all—if we are able to comprehend them on an equally

sophisticated level of analysis. The concept of performance, and our studies of

performance, can help us understand and respond to these new exigencies. (7)

Only through ―sophisticated levels of analysis,‖ particularly self-analysis, can Lianne begin to

―comprehend‖ the act, the symbol, and the communication. In these analytical moments, like

when she ―began to understand. Performance art, yes‖ (164), we see Lianne‘s critical

engagement with the falling man as she tries to understand his ―actual implications‖ (Bell 7).

Although perplexing, the ―undeniably symbolic‖ acts (Bell 7) of the falling man are not lost on

Lianne, and her interactions with his performance straddle her need to both relive and rethink the

original event, and interpret it enough to move on.

Three years after her first two encounters with the falling man‘s performances, Lianne

reads the falling man‘s obituary in the newspaper and decides to investigate his life further,

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demonstrating her need to continue ―interpreting‖ the performance and him. Searching for

articles about the falling man, Lianne tries to find an image that captured the second performance

she witnessed, but ―there were no photographs of that fall. She was the photograph, the

photosensitive surface. That nameless body coming down, this was hers to record and absorb‖

(223). On the one hand, the falling man‘s legacy is Lianne‘s need to connect, understand, and

know him, fostering a relationship over her several encounters with his performance. However,

in her searching, she becomes the ―proactive‖ character continuing in his tradition. Because of

Lianne‘s interactions with and reflections on the falling man, she becomes ―the photograph,‖ the

interpreter, and the ―record.‖ For Lianne, the performance means taking an active role in the

theatrics, a role where she is responsible for more than mere observation. She is responsible for

―absorbing‖ the act as well. Lianne‘s ―photosensitivity‖ refers to the transfer from actor to

observer—a place of contact and transmittance via performance. Lianne‘s act of absorption

means to integrate the act into herself—to make it part of her. The performance forces her to cast

her glance finally inward instead outward at the performance. As she does so, she is changed

lastingly on an emotional level.

Lianne‘s ―absorption‖ also points out a deeper transfer that refers to more than a simple

image transfer, but an affective dimensionality in which her newfound ―sensitivity‖ is utilized.

Lianne‘s contact with the falling man affects her interactive ―surface‖—her understanding of the

image—as well as her emotional profundity. This lasting emotional connection relates back to

the original photographs taken on 9/11—the falling man‘s performance restages the original free

fall in such a way that Lianne‘s mind and heart are affected, signaling her rethinking and

refeeling 9/11. While researching the performer, Lianne remembers seeing the picture of the

iconic 9/11 falling figure: ―The picture burned a hole in her mind and heart, dear God, he was a

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falling angel and his beauty was horrific‖ (222). Through reencountering the original fall through

a performance of such, Lianne is lastingly touched (more deeply than her surface) in her ―mind‖

and ―heart‖ in a way that the original encounter with the iconic figure did not. Thus, the

performance helped overcome the emotionally distanced image through Lieanne‘s proactive

response and interpretation of it.

In contrast to Lianne‘s active role as an audience member, Jonathan Safran Foer‘s

Exteremly Loud and Incredibly Close portrays its protagonist, nine year old Oskar Schell, as

Yorick in a staged performance of Hamlet, therein thrusting him into the limelight, making him a

meaning maker and symbol of 9/11‘s violent communication. Oskar‘s on-stage theatrics work to

further redefine the relationship between actor and audience in the reimagining of terror and the

―between spaces‖ where actor and audience meet—a meeting which proves to be both

unconventional in execution and frightening in its violent implications. After his father was

killed in the WTC attacks, Oskar searches through New York City trying to find a lock that fits a

key his father left behind, getting to know a number of New York strangers in the process. In

sum, he acts out the part of a detective in his search for the meaning of his father‘s life, death,

and his own relationship to it.

Oskar‘s somewhat dramatic search for meaning, however, is thematized by a clearly

staged moment of performance in his school‘s production of Shakespeare‘s Hamlet, a play that

itself portrays an son avenging his father‘s untimely and wrongful death. This parallel uncovers

Oskar‘s personal anxieties in his relationship to 9/11, his father‘s death, and his own identity. In

one of the most overt performances in the novel, Oskar‘s portrayal of Yorick showcases his

struggle to find meaning in these relationships. Oskar‘s part is minimal at best—he is dressed up

as a skull—and he does not deliver any lines. Instead, Oskar is acted upon by Jimmy Snyder, the

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Hamlet character, who delivers the well-known line, ―Alas, poor Yorick . . .‖ (144). Oskar,

reflecting on his character‘s immobility and the audience‘s apathy, wonders, ―What‘s the point

of giving an extremely subtle performance if basically no one is watching?‖ (143). Like the

unsubtle performance executed on 9/11 (perhaps in response to American apathy towards

competing world views) terrorists delivered a rude wakeup call to the West. In this sense,

Oskar‘s observation is strangely reminiscent of the symbolic acts of 9/11 which penetrated

America‘s economic and military heart. Paralleling Oskar‘s frustration with the 9/11 terrorists

points out a fundamental crisis in communication, for one could interpret the 9/11 act as a violent

reaction to a nation that refused to pay attention to previous warnings. Post 9/11 security analysts

like Brian Jenkins now suggest that listening is an important avenue to explore to preemptively

stop attacks like 9/11: ―If you want to know what [terrorists] are thinking about, listen to what

they have to say‖ (Unconquerable Nation 61). In this instance of irritation, Oskar feels ostracized

and silenced. Thus, it is not surprising that a few nights following Oskar‘s frustrated observation,

he imagines a not-so-―subtle‖ performance in his mind‘s eye, a violent performance in which he

becomes the lead actor of Hamlet and viscously bashes in Jimmy Snyder‘s head. For Oskar, this

is his way of reacting to an indifferent crowd, and getting back at a bully.

Oskar‘s imagined performance is unconventional because its make-believe break with

convention provides a ―safe‖ place that the imagined violence can be considered, played out, and

rethought by readers. Oskar feels ―on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything

in the universe, but also extremely alone‖ (145). Echoing the intense adverbs from the book‘s

title, Oskar‘s emotions point to an excess of feeling much like Lianne‘s encounter with the

falling man that was ―too deep.‖ To combat the aloneness, Oskar, in his mind‘s eye, smashes

Jimmy‘s head, and his imaginary audience gives him a standing ovation and cries, ―Thank you!

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Thank you, Oskar! We love you so much! We‘ll protect you!‖ (146). Oskar‘s violence prompts a

response because it forces the audience to pay attention and react. In his imagination, the

reaction is a positive one because he is the hero of the show. The imaginary safeness promised

by his audience takes place as Oskar, the stationary actor, takes control of and unconventionally

―improvises‖ (145) a new play—one that is neither pre-scripted nor rehearsed. Oskar takes the

role of the hero as he disposes of the bully, takes center stage through violence, and is finally

heard. Instead of feeling distanced and ―lonely‖ on stage, Oskar finally feels ―love,‖ albeit an

imagined love. Thus, Oskar‘s reimagining of Hamlet functions on many levels. On the one hand,

it represents Oskear‘s search not only to understand, but to be understood, and his improvised

and imagined performance provides him a dynamic fictional connection with his audience

standing and responding to him. However, on another level, the performance is a brutal one in

which conventional means of communication are rescripted while Oskrar rewrites Yorick‘s

character. Instead of a stationary, dead character, Oskar imagines an active protagonist. His

imagination brings Yorick to life and disposes of the traditional protagonist, Hamlet, by brutally

hurting him. In the end, Oskar‘s rethinking of the play prompts audience support. In this reading,

Oskar recognizes the potential for violence within himself, and that violence is directed at the

bully of the show, Hamlet, or, if read allegorically in alignment with the political ―play‖ of 9/11,

the bully of the West.

However, Oskar does not really play out that brutality, but instead remains the inert skull,

underlining the text‘s suggestion that the imagination constitutes a place where the original

violence of 9/11 can be relived, rethought, and rewritten. Fiction itself seems to work in the same

way as Oskar‘s imaginary, as a place of potential reworking of history. Oskar does not resort to

actual violence, but stops himself in the world of his daydream. Oskar‘s act is on the one hand

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vividly real—readers do not realize that it is imagined until after it plays out in the narrative. On

the other hand, the act‘s fictionality underlines an important move in post 9/11 literature

collapsing the distance between fiction and reality in the eyes of the readers. Literature after

9/11‘s editors Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn suggest that many post 9/11 texts

explore ―the space between the real and the imagined, between image and trope, and between the

private realm of memory and the public realm of history. 9/11 literature impels us to see these

spaces even as it forces them together‖ (2). Oskar‘s moment of performance ―forces‖ the

imagined and the reality together for himself and the text‘s readers. Through his acting out and

uncovering of post 9/11 anxieties Oskar is able to process his contradictory feelings and the

text‘s readers witness and interpret the show. Even though his inner violence boils over in his

Hamlet performance, it remains a ―safe‖ place for Oskar and readers to rethink 9/11, consider

actions that might have preemptively stopped it, and identify with those who executed the terror.

Even though the violent performance is imagined, Oskar‘s real live performance still

touches his audience, showing that even a passive performance requires some active audience

interaction. Through audience members‘ acknowledgement of Oskar, the elementary school

performance, like DeLillo‘s Falling Man, brings people together, albeit in a perplexing way.

Like Lianne searching for meaning and understanding after witnessing the falling man‘s

performances, many of the strangers Oskar meets throughout New York City come to his play to

connect with and perhaps try to understand Oskar through his Shakespearean rendition. Oskar

notes that although many of the strangers in the audience know him, they do not know each

other, and he uses his treasure hunts through Central Park as a hermeneutic to understand the

connections. He says, ―what was weird was that they didn‘t know what they had in common,

which was kind of like how I didn‘t know what the thumbtack, the bent spoon . . . and all those

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other things I dug up in Central Park had to do with each other‖ (143). Oskar‘s performance,

however, connects these disparate people through an event—a ―common‖ experience that each

person shares a moment of communication. His performance is the binding glue between each of

the New Yorkers‘ evenings, a relationality that provides a connection that did not exist before.

After Oskar comes to from his imaginary performance, he looks ―out across the audience from

underneath the skull . . . I saw Abe Black, and he saw me. I knew that we were sharing

something with our eyes, but I didn‘t know what, and I didn‘t know if it mattered‖ (147). Abe

Black, one of the strangers that helped Oskar in his quest to find the lock, share ―something‖ in

the moment of the performance—the moment when the actor and the spectator acknowledge one

another as more than actor and audience member, but as people. This ―something‖ escapes

Oskar‘s comprehension just as the falling man eludes Lianne‘s understanding: ―The man eluded

her . . . she could believe she knew these people, and all the others she‘d seen and heard that

afternoon, but not the man who‘d stood above her, detailed and looming‖ (224). Even through

the ambiguity, the moment of recognition promotes meaning, connection, and a mutual

understanding and interest in the individual through the ―act.‖ Both of these performances bring

groups of strangers together—strangers who are connected to each other through nothing other

than the theater.2

These moments of connection also prompt readers to reconnect to the original

performance of 9/11 not as passive spectators, but through taking initiative in the theatrical

communication process by reintroducing personal connection into the interpretation of the

symbolic act.

Such meetings and connections are significant in that they promote relationality in an

otherwise fractured and broken post 9/11 world, a world which Kristiaan Versluys suggests

broke limits in an already cracked existence. In Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel,

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(2009) Versluys extrapolates upon the indefinable event of 9/11: ―in the instantaneity of its

horror and in its far flung repercussions 9/11 is unpossessable. It is a limit event that shatters the

symbiotic resources of the culture and defeats the normal processes of meaning making‖ (1-2).

Although it is a crushing ―limit,‖ 9/11 prompts a new discussion of ―meaning making processes‖

in a horror-filled post 9/11 context. Even with communication difficulties in this context, fictions

responding to the event still try to make meaning even amid 9/11‘s ―shattering of resources.‖

They all face the same quandary: if the event is seemingly outside of language, definitions, and

possession, how is it to be represented? Even if one posits that nothing can exist outside of these

sign systems, Foer‘s and DeLillo‘s texts innovatively reimagine these systems by suggesting that

although the event seemingly defies words, it did not defy communicative processes.

Communication that promotes a back and forth dialogue between various speakers and

actors is fulfilled through the texts in theatrical moments where staged symbols are open enough

for audiences to connect, share, and grow. Therefore, because of the nature of the exchanges

between Lianne and the falling man, Oskar and Abe Black, a recognition becomes apparent in

the exchange between actor and audience, and a self awareness comes to play within the main

characters themselves. Without the exchange, interaction, and new mode of communication, the

recognition would not take place and the performance would remain static and ―unpossessable.‖

Post 9/11 literature as Performance

Not only do post 9/11 texts focus on theatrical episodes within their narrative structures,

but their formal composition also explores performance‘s role as textual, both mimicking and re-

representing the original terror of the event. As Schechner comments, ―Both bin Laden and Bush

reduced the complexities of the situation to a performative either/or by casting the other side as

‗evil.‘ Categories such as ‗good‘ and ‗evil‘ and terms such as ‗tragedy‘ and ‗jihad‘ (holy war)

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invoke a highly theatrical protagonist-antagonist conflict‖ (265). Post 9/11 fiction‘s re-

representations necessitate audience involvement through the audience‘s physical movement in

―reading‖ the texts—an active reading that reintroduces ―complexities‖ back into a nuanced

event in terms of its scope and ramifications. In the context of an event that is oftentimes

interpreted as a distanced spectacle, post 9/11 fiction‘s formal performativity collapses audience

distance in order to promote open dialogues where authors, texts, and readers work together to

make meaning. As such, the behavior of post 9/11 fiction defies the event‘s polarizing effect by

examining 9/11‘s nuanced symbolism through equally symbolic performatives.

To regain the complexity that was lost in the face of political performances following

9/11, literatures like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close require significant effort on the part of

the audience. Audiences are asked to engage with the text not only through physical movement

and immediate response that comes from the physical act of scanning a page, but also through

critical analysis as much of the meaning from the theatrics remains as ―open‖ as the falling

man‘s performance—ambiguous and undefined. Interactive texts require readers to wrestle with

meanings as well as physically engage with the text in such a way that readers can add their

voices to the convoluted theater of 9/11 through visual invitations like open spaces on the page.

Opening up new communication pathways, post 9/11 texts formally act out the paradoxes and

complexities that came to light through the original attack. They also offer themselves up as new

stages of audience interaction and interpretation focusing on communication and communion

rather than detachment and inertness.

Through interaction, the texts create new spaces of thinking about 9/11 where the event

is not out of reach, but is brought back into the limelight of public discourse and ethical

discussion. Indeed, this assertion follows in line with a general understanding of

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postmodernism‘s self-aware textuality. It also, however, furthers the understanding of what texts

and readers alike can accomplish in the context of terror, namely, to reclaim an act that some

posit exists outside of language and experience through action and communication. In his famous

essay ―From Work to Text‖ (1971), Roland Barthes distinguishes between a work and a text in

terms of the interactivity needed to interpret texts. Reading his theatrical vocabulary in the light

of 9/11 literature‘s performativity make this connection even more important: ―The work is held

in the hand, the text is held in language: it exists only when caught up in a discourse. The text is

experienced only in an activity, in a production‖ (237). The theatrical ―production‖ of post 9/11

literature in this case relates to its staging of 9/11 narratives that require audience involvement to

overcome the unmoving space separating audiences from the event. As Barthes suggests, texts

must be ―experienced‖ through ―activity‖ and ―discourse.‖ Post 9/11 texts achieve this activity

through prompting audience response in terms of movement and dynamic interpretation.

Post 9/11 texts ―act‖ as complex the original event, mixing fiction and nonfiction, diverse

narrative techniques, text and graphics, and shocking audience expectations to provoke an active

response—a response that requires readers to rethink and interact with 9/11 and terrorism on an

intimate level. In the confusion, trauma, and fear following 9/11, Americans scrambled in their

shock to try to define an enemy and fill in unanswered questions in the face of horror—who did

it, why, and how? John C. Cawelti asserts that this moment was used as a political stage: ―[t]he

Bush administration was able to use the ideological fragmentation and polarization . . . to

intensify the public‘s fear and uncertainty in the aftermath of 9/11 (212). Texts like Extremely

Loud and Incredibly Close revive the original confusion before the polarization of the American

public through formal strategies. For example, the text mimics ―uncertainty‖ and

―fragmentation‖ and, instead of giving answers to confusion, recreates the blank spaces of 9/11

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for readers to fill in. This ―fill in the blank‖ move creates a new dialogue between the text and its

readers as readers must reconfront the original confusion and fear that 9/11 represented without

political filters.

The ways in which Foer‘s text employs formal unconventionality to recall and revisit

post 9/11 psychologies are illustrated by a scene in which Oskar eavesdrops on his mother and

his psychologist. In this moment, Oskar has to work to fill in the gaps of the conversation. As

Oskar tries to listen in, he uses a stethoscope but he hears only snippets of the dialogue. As he is

faced with the unintelligible spaces, the audience is formally faced with them as well. Oskar

hears, and the audience sees, the broken conversation: ―used to be someone me a

question, and I could say yes, or but believe in short answers anymore‖ (204). In this

formal move, the voice of Oskar‘s mother and the doctor are confused as neither one is identified

by the text. This performance not only leaves the meaning of the spaces ambiguous, but it also

collapses the distance between the voice of authority and the common perspective—bringing the

confusion of the terrorist attacks to the forefront of the conversation and letting the audience

decide how to fill in the open spaces that are too wide to be occupied with simple ―short

answers.‖ As words and roles are scrambled, Oskar and the audience are left to interpret in the

blanks in a highly symbolic moment of the novel, one in which the falling man image is inserted

into the middle of the overheard conversation. The audience identifies with Oskar in this moment

as his inability to understand his own psychological lapses following 9/11 reflects the audience‘s

inability to fully grasp the literal and figurative ―blank spaces‖ that were left after the Twin

Towers fell. The towers fell both literally, crumbling to pieces and leaving a gaping hole in the

New York skyline, and figuratively, symbolizing the United States‘ attacked economic stability.

Confronting the image along with the white spaces works to remind readers of 9/11 and the

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literal and figurative open questions lingering after the event. As readers attempt to discern the

conversation, they become part of the text‘s dialogue, and also add their interpretations to a

highly complex event of 9/11.

In another instance, Foer‘s text presents an indecipherable page that readers must try to

interpret and make sense of, therein mimicking the confusion experienced by Oskar, his family,

and others, in the post 9/11 fray. Again, this formal experiment invites readers to take a dynamic

part in the retelling of the post 9/11 narrative. In this instance, the text includes one page where

the uniform lines of prose lose the conventional spacing separating lines of horizontal text and

diverges into an unreadable overlapping ―script.‖ Narrated by Oskar‘s grandfather, the section

states, ―there won‘t be enough pages in this book for me to tell you what I need to tell you, I

could write smaller, I could slice the pages down their edges to make two pages, I could write

over my own writing, but then what?‖ (276). Consequently, the audience is confronted with the

question of ―what happens‖ when there is not enough room to fully express ―what [one] need[s]

to tell.‖ As the narration continues, the text acts out the question by beginning to overlap itself,

and asks the audience to respond to this problem through its formal questioning of textuality. The

story continues with the account of the grandfather meeting his grandson and Oskar sharing his

father‘s last words before the towers collapsed. At this point, the text converges upon itself and

the line spacing diminishes as the text literally ―writes over [its] own writing.‖ In this symbolic

gesture, the text suggests that there is not enough room, and will never be enough room, to tell

the 9/11 story completely—and the audience is faced with such a realization visually.

The most important part of this novel‘s performance, however, is the audience‘s role in

visual interpretation. The text demands that readers rethink traditional modes of written

communication, and also conventional modes of textual analysis. In the blackness of the

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confused text, readers must confront the ―rubble‖ of 9/11, where language has failed. It also

provides a place where the fill in the blank episode and the blackness coincide to create open

areas of audience response. These responses may range from reactions to 9/11, answers to the

questions posed, or moments of self-awareness where the audience must critically self-assess

before adding an answer to the void. The moment is intimate in its demand of audience

interaction—an interaction that causes the connection between reader and text to grow even in its

ambiguity. Thus, the overlapping text suggests overlapping interpretations.

The final instance of Foer‘s formal theatrics forces readers to physically interact with the

text by flipping through the last pages of the book, thereby solidifying audience interaction to the

end. At the close of the text, what Mitchum Huehls calls ―the flip book‘s cinematic‖ (43) comes

into play. These pages show the falling man drifting upward through the air as the audience

scans the final image-based ―flip book.‖ For Walter Kirn and Timothy Dow Adams, this is one

of the overly sentimental parts of the novel where Foer‘s ―avant-guard‖ toolkit is little more than

a regressive move (182). This critique might relate to the fact that flip books were traditionally

made for a young audience, and therefore it is a ―regressive‖ positioning of an adult reader, yet

the flip book puts readers into the innocent and helpless role of a child like Oskar Schell, trying

to make sense of the horrific falling man image. Just as many adults who watched the events on

9/11 felt helpless and confused, the text attempts to recapture a sense of innocence and

vulnerability. In the novel, Oskar imagines the falling man falling up instead of down—a

reversal in time to a place where everything would have been okay. This flip book represents a

strangely hopeful image in the face of the horror—a reversal in which Oskar‘s dad would have

been alive. It also puts the book into ―motion‖ like in DeLillo‘s text where the falling man‘s

moving audience creates a sense of immediacy for the actor. Foer‘s audience is forced to once

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again be involved in the performance—a performance that Huehls explains requires one to

―quickly flip through the last few pages of the book, bringing [the] cinematic . . . to the reader‘s

own fingertips and making the novel performatively coextensive with Oskar‘s journal‖ (43).

Building off of this movement and audience interaction with the flip book, readers are asked to

be actors. The structure of the ending forces them to physically be a part of the text‘s

performance. A highly charged moment in its performative nature, the text simultaneously acts

out two roles: the ending of both Oskar‘s journal and the novel. In a strange way it is also a call

to action at the book‘s close, a physical movement that requires audience participation to have

meaning. As readers create the ―flip book‘s cinematic,‖ they are confronted with a choice: to

accept Oskar‘s vision or to reject it, to flip through the images, or to remain immobile.

Foer‘s choice to end with image and movement is at once responsive to the profound

visuality of 9/11, and resistant of the objectified spectacle that it represents. Experimenting with

new modalities of communication, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close asks readers to

overcome the static, removed images of 9/11, and collapses the distance between action and the

observer. And yet, post 9/11 texts at large cannot sidestep completely the image-based event and

response. Speaking of context, Dana Heller explains that images played ―a major role in

managing the disaster imagery . . . On average, Americans watched eight hours of television

news coverage on September 11‖ (7). It comes as no surprise, then, that post 9/11 literature is

likewise self-aware of its visuality and performs such in its restaging of 9/11 events and culture.

Huehls points out the use of images and performance in relation to temporal representation in

Foer‘s use photographs and graphic images of the falling man figure. For Huehls, the image

based performance is a representation of ―the US struggle to manage its own timely traumas

since 9/11‖ as the US struggled to figuratively ―connect the dots‖ of 9/11 and respond in real

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time to a fragmented event (43). Indeed, the performances and representations in these texts

require an interactive audience that must respond to contextual imagery and text while rethinking

its relationship to 9/11. As both texts—Foer‘s and DeLillo‘s—make extensive use of the falling

man figure, they confuse the distance between the ―true‖ image, and fiction‘s response and use

of the image. In doing so they argue that the ―true‖ image‘s static nature emotionally distances

viewers and stifles interaction with 9/11 through its immobility.

Dramatic Conclusions

As performance theorist Robert Brustein noted about the overt performative nature of the

terrorist attacks, ―In an ominous coincidence, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and

the Pentagon occurred around the beginning of the Second Millennium, a time traditionally

associated with Apocalypse. In a slightly less apocalyptic synchronism, September 11 also

coincides with the beginning of every new theater season‖ (242). Post 9/11 fictions like Don

DeLillo‘s Falling Man and Jonathan Safran Foer‘s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

showcase plot-driven moments of performance and formal performativity to highlight the

relationships between actors and audiences in the post 9/11 moment. They do this to reinsert

complex characters into cultural memories about the event, and with the ten year anniversary of

the attacks approaching, revisiting these texts allows for a dynamic view of 9/11‘s cultural

impact.

By demanding significant readerly responsibility from their audiences through formal

theatrics like page flipping and graphics, posts 9/11 literatures require interactive communication

methods that lead to synergetic conversation. Indeed, post 9/11 texts point to none other than

their readers as a site of critical interpretation and possible ethical response to 9/11—and so by

opening up a dialogue between reader, writer, and text. These fictions do not reduce the

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complexities of culpability and trauma as issues, but instead complicate them by restaging the

event to elicit new responses. Many characters are at ―play,‖ and in considering performances,

readers take on one of the most important ―roles‖ in the process of meaning making and

interpretation. The texts take the conversation out of the realm of political banter, and

philosophical theory, and put the process back into meaningful communication processes.

Perhaps the most important implication of studying 9/11 fiction and performance is the

acknowledgement that these fictions refuse to be mere spectacles for hungry readers to objectify.

For critics and common readers alike, post 9/11 literatures play with their audience in such a way

that they refuse to be consumed. They implode the static distance that inherent in a spectacle, and

confront readers through movement and ambiguity, and as such, retain dynamic personalities by

attempting to create new exigencies of reader response in the face of 9/11‘s tragedy. Their self-

aware textuality both works in conjunction with other postmodern texts that deal with trauma, as

well as furthers the textual production process in the context of communication. Barthes posits,

―The text requires an attempt to abolish (or at least deminish) the distance between writing and

reading, not by intensifying the reader's projection of the work, but by linking the two together.‖

(239). In this theatrical ―linking‖ neither the actor or the audience member is placed above the

other, but the traditional stage is broken down to promote open dialogues and communion. Post

9/11 literature invites ―practical collaboration‖ and inhabits a ―social space‖ that actively

eliminates distance and promotes therapeutic conversation (Barthes 240-41).

If communication‘s base is communion, post 9/11 texts reduce stagnant reactions to

horror by promoting both vertical and horizontal moments of recognition. Actors and audiences

connect through post 9/11 fictions just as strongly as audience members become aware of their

positionality in relation to other audience members. Through this communion, 9/11 fiction‘s

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examination of performance in the context of the event overcomes the horrific media staging of

the original act by its own breaking down of historical, social, and political stages. Instead of

advancing the assertion that 9/11 changed everything, post 9/11 fictions attempt to change

everything about the way critics and citizens alike think about 9/11.

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End Notes

1. Kristiaan Versluys gives a broad overview of the different ways critics have relegated 9/11

outside the boundaries of language. He writes, ―The writer Star Black calls the collapse of the

buildings ‗a sight without reference,‘ while Dori Laub, a psychoanalyst well known for his work

with Holocaust survivors, states that ‗9/11 was an encounter with something that makes no sense,

an event that fits nowhere.‘ Similarly, James Berger declares: ‗Nothing adequate, nothing

corresponding in language could stand for it.‘ For Jenny Edkins, 9/11 is a traumatic event that ‗is

outside the bounds of language, outside the worlds we have made for ourselves‘‖ (Out of the

Blue 2). Jeffery Melknick contends that in this loss for words has created a new language that

presented itself to describe the event. He says, ―‗9/11‘ is a language. It has its own vocabulary,

grammar, and tonalities‖ (6). Versluys succinctly overviews the many ways in which citizens

and scholars alike have relegated the event of 9/11 as outside of the definable and the

expressible, and Melknick suggests that because of such, new vocabularies have grown to

surround the discussion of the event.

2. In a similar way, 9/11 connected communities across the United States through fundraising,

blood donations and television coverage. Along with the surge in patriotism, fundraisers and

blood donations were a common way that Americans showed support for the victims of the

attacks. Simone Glynn et al in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported ―...the

number of blood donations in the weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks was markedly

greater than in the corresponding weeks of 2000 (2.5 times greater in the first week after the

attacks; 1.3–1.4 times greater in the second to fourth weeks after the attack)‖ (289).

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